by Jenny Lykins
She stared into the fire, wondering at the odd sense of loss she felt. What if he stayed gone?
She should be irritated that he’d interrupted her vacation, taking her mind off her work and the problem with David. But her work and her decisions seemed somehow less important the longer Jared stayed away.
An eighteenth century tricorn fluttered out of nowhere and landed in the center of the living room carpet.
Alane sat up and swung her feet to the floor. He was back!
She scanned the room, anxious for him to appear. Finally the air shimmered and he stood there, wearing jeans and an oxford shirt. Just the sight of him sent her heart to her throat, and the reaction had nothing to do with fear.
"I thought I'd throw my hat in first. If you didn't pull a gun and shoot at it, it'd be safe to come in." Though his smile had her insides doing somersaults, his eyes asked if she was still angry. How could someone with such raw sexuality have so much little boy charm?
Alane chewed on her lower lip in an attempt not to smile.
"I won't shoot at your hat if you promise not to read my mind anymore."
He screwed up his face and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. After several seconds of melodramatic deliberation, he looked back at her and nodded.
"It's a deal. But I can't promise I won't slip now and then. Old habits die hard."
She narrowed her eyes at him.
"No loopholes allowed."
"Okay, okay. I promise." The hat melted away into nothing as he flopped into the leather recliner. "What are you working on?"
She glanced at the sketchpad, which was covered with charcoal drawings of him.
"Oh, nothing." She flipped the pad closed. "Just trying to generate some inspiration."
"Lost the spark, huh?"
Alane blinked at his perception. She didn't often meet someone who understood artistic highs and lows.
"Yes, as a matter of fact. That's why I rented this place. To try and concentrate on finding the passion."
"And I've done nothing but interrupt you. I'll go and leave you - "
"No!" She nearly jumped off the couch. When he didn't move she leaned back and tucked her legs back under the blanket. "You don't need to go. As a matter of fact, I could use some company."
"Great!" He settled back into the leather. "Do you like television?"
"Television?" Not exactly what she had in mind.
"Yeah."
"It's okay, I guess. Is there something on you'd like to watch?" She hoped he'd take the hint at her lack of enthusiasm.
His eyes lit up. "Would you mind? It's been years since anyone rented the place at Christmas time. I'd love to see a good old-fashioned Christmas special."
Alane started to ask him why he didn't just turn on the TV and watch them, but she caught herself. There was probably a good reason, and she probably didn't want to know it. She picked up the remote and flicked on the TV, then channel surfed through three cartoon specials, a Christmas in Hawaii show, and a dozen sitcom re-runs.
"Looks like you're out of luck," she said as she tossed the remote onto the coffee table, not at all sorry to turn off the boob tube.
He scrunched lower in the recliner and sighed.
"Hey, I know!" She snapped her fingers and kicked off the blanket again. "I've got some Christmas CD's out in the car." She tried to cram her feet into her boots, then had to stop and take off two pairs of socks. "We'll have our own Christmas special. You'll have to imagine the tree, though. I don't do real trees. Too much of a fire hazard."
"My imagination's good. Not as good as a real tree, but good."
She headed out the door and found Jared waiting for her in the car.
"Are they old Christmas carols? I don't think I could abide anything with rap music or barking dogs."
Alane smiled at his look of horror. "Do I look like the rap music type?"
He squinted at her.
"One can never tell these days."
She pulled a handful of CD's from the car, then slipped and slid back to the house. He was pacing next to the stereo when she stomped her way through the door. She half-expected him to ask her what took her so long.
"Let's see, I've got - "
"This one. Play this one first." Jared poked his finger through the first CD of mixed artists.
Alane pulled the disc from its cover and slid it into the player. She added four more, then turned on the system and adjusted the speakers. A male tenor's clear, haunting voice filled the room with O Holy Night.
Jared smiled and closed his eyes.
"It's been a long time."
"How long?" Alane asked.
"At least ten years since I've heard a Christmas carol that wasn't part of a TV commercial. This place doesn't stay that busy this time of year."
Alane wanted to ask him how long he'd been at the cabin and why he didn't leave, but he looked too happy at the moment. She couldn't imagine ten years without celebrating Christmas. Ten years, alone on Christmas Eve. She’d struggled with the decision to spend just one alone.
While he sank back into the recliner and became one with the music, Alane kicked off her boots, put her two extra pairs of socks back on, then tossed a bag of popcorn into the microwave. All the comforts of home, she thought, in a hundred year old cabin. And no one for him to share it with.
She started to pour herself a glass of wine, then remembered the night before and poured a diet cola instead. When she re-entered the living room with a heaping bowl of popcorn, Jared sat in the recliner, his head back and his eyes closed, looking for the world as if he were asleep.
She admired the curve of his jaw, the way his hair fell in dark waves that begged to be touched, and wondered if ghosts slept.
"No," was on the tip of his tongue in answer to her unasked question, but then Jared remembered he wasn't supposed to read her mind anymore. Not that he'd done it on purpose that time. It was devilish hard to break old habits.
He opened his eyes and smiled at her. A flicker of suspicion flashed across her face, but she merely smiled back and curled up in her corner of the couch.
His heart lurched at the sight of her, all warm and cuddly-looking in those awful gray sweats smeared in a rainbow of paints. He wondered if she smelled as good as she looked.
"Enjoying the music?"
He closed his eyes and pulled his thoughts away from what it would feel like to nuzzle his face in the silk of her hair.
"Mmmm. Yes. Thank you for thinking of it."
"My pleasure."
He heard her munching on popcorn and wished he could feed it to her, one plump kernel at a time.
The jangling ring of the telephone jerked him from his pleasant thoughts. The irritating sound of that contraption was a noise he would never, in a hundred lifetimes, learn to like.
Alane wiped her fingers on her sweats and thankfully picked the thing up before it could ring again.
"Hello?"
Jared fought the overwhelming urge to tune in on the conversation, especially since the look on her face suggested the other person was a male.
"No. I don't think that's a good idea...I came here so I could be alone and work." She flicked her gaze toward Jared. "No, I'm not lonely. Really, David. I don't mind spending Christmas alone. I want some time alone...All right...I'll see you then." With a hastily murmured, "Bye," she hung up and gave Jared a weak smile.
"Boyfriend?" he asked, amazed at how hard it was to keep the red hot jealousy from creeping into his voice.
She gave a non-committal shrug. "Sometimes."
"Is he coming up?" Jared would be damned if he'd let the man within one hundred yards of the cabin.
"No. I came here to be alone and I don't want any company." She tossed a handful of popcorn into her mouth, then her eyes widened and she swallowed fast. "Not that I want you to leave."
At least those words lessened the sting of a boyfriend.
"I couldn't leave even if you wanted me to." Damn. Why had he said that out loud?
> She sat up a little in the corner of the couch and took a sip of her soft drink.
"You can't leave? Why not?"
Jared slouched in the chair and wondered when he'd lost control of his mouth.
"I don't know."
"You don't know why you can't leave?"
He sighed. "No. I came back about twenty-five years ago and I haven't been able to leave since."
"You came back? You mean you'd been here before and managed to leave?"
Jared closed his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose. He hadn't wanted to get into this conversation. Not yet. He raised his head and looked her in the eye.
"I died here."
CHAPTER FOUR
Alane couldn't believe her ears. She looked around the room and shivered.
"Here?" She hadn't actively thought of him dying.
"Not actually in this cabin. It hadn't been built yet. My home sat on this sight nearly two hundred years ago, but I found that it burned to the ground shortly after my wife and I died."
Two hundred years. It sounded just as astounding as the first time she'd heard it. And he'd had a wife. Why did that knowledge cause such an emptiness in her? Had he loved her very much?
"How...How did you die?"
He stared into the fire as Silent Night played softly in the background. He stared so long, she thought perhaps he hadn't heard her question.
"It's not important now," he finally said, a seriousness in his voice she'd never heard. He continued to gaze into space, seeing something that must have brought him immense sadness.
How she wished she could touch him right now. To thread her fingers through his dark, thick hair. To smooth away the lines caused by the pain in his eyes. Without thinking, she rose, then knelt at his feet. Ever so slowly, as he turned his gaze to hers, she placed her hand through his on the armrest. She felt that warmth again. That subtle, summer's breeze warmth as her hand mingled inside his.
He looked at her, then closed his eyes, as if she'd somehow made the pain increase.
And then he vanished.
*******
Jared plowed his fingers through his hair from forehead to crown, pacing the length and breadth of what had once been his property.
How could he continue to spend time with Alane? The very sight of her stirred an ache in his heart he thought never to feel. When she'd so gently placed her hand in his, he thought he would perish from the want, the need, to touch her. But to touch her, to really touch her, would take more than all his strength, and he would fade to whatever world awaited beyond this. An unknown world, without Alane. A fate, in his eyes, far worse than wandering the earth alone.
He paced throughout the night, cursing himself for caring, wanting desperately to go to her, forcing himself to stay away. Not until the morning sun had climbed high enough to burn away the fog did he finally admit he could never stay away from her now.
In the space of a heartbeat he stood inside the cabin, sensing instantly that she wasn't there. He found her digging her car out of the snow. A knot of fear lodged in his throat. Would she leave now? Would he never see her again?
He moved himself to her side, watching as she dug her tires out of a drift.
"I'm sorry about last night."
She bounced off the car and landed in a four foot snowdrift.
"Bloody hell! Would you stop doing that?" she yelped as she struggled to her feet, snow-encrusted from head to toe.
"Okay, I'll wear a bell around my neck if you promise not to leave." He tried to keep his voice light and playful. Neither of which he felt.
She worked in a vain attempt to knock the snow from her clothes.
"Leave? I'm not leaving."
"You're not?" His day brightened as if the sun had emerged from a total eclipse. "I thought you were leaving because of the way I..." He let the statement trail off, not exactly anxious to put his behavior into words for her.
"No, I'm just digging the car out in case I need to go get supplies. Some of my paints froze when I left them in the car." She fished around in the snow for the shovel, which had buried itself when she dropped it. "Actually," she dragged the back of a ski-gloved hand across her forehead as she stared at the ground, "I figured I should be doing the apologizing. I shouldn't have been so nosy. I didn't really mean to pry." She straightened and looked him in the eye. "It has to be painful. I shouldn't have asked you to recall those memories."
Did she have any idea how beautiful she was? Not just the combination of hair and eyes, skin and cheekbones, lips that begged to be kissed. But beautiful from within. A goodness, a serenity with herself that radiated from her like rays from a sun.
"It wasn't the memories, Alane," he said quietly. "I left because it hurt too much not to be able to touch you back."
The apology left her eyes, replaced by an emotion he couldn't quite name. She dropped her gaze and he thought he would go mad resisting the impulse to read her thoughts. She shook her head, then looked back at him.
"Jared, I - "
The blare of a car horn interrupted her as a four-wheel drive pulled up the freshly-plowed road.
"Damn you, David," she muttered under her breath.
Alane threw down the snow shovel and waded over to the car pulling into the drive she'd just shoveled. Ice on the driver's window distorted the handsome blond features of her on-again, off-again boyfriend.
The window came down and little sheets of ice fell into the car. David smiled up at her with his you-can't-be-mad-at-me smile.
"Hi, sweetheart. Thought I'd surprise - "
"Don't even bother getting out, David. Just turn it around and go home." She pointed in the direction he'd just come.
"Now you don't mean - "
"I meant everything, David. I meant I don't want company. I meant I want to spend Christmas alone. I meant I want to get some serious work done, and I meant I want to be alone to think about us and whether or not there is an us. What part of that don't you understand?"
He shoved the door open and stepped out into the snow.
"Okay, okay, just calm down. I shouldn't have come up here against your wishes. I realize that now." He leaned against the car and pulled her to him. "But I miss you, and I hate the thought of spending Christmas Eve alone."
Alane dodged a kiss and stepped away from him. If he'd said he couldn't bear the thought of her spending Christmas Eve alone, she might have caved. Her thoughts went to Jared, who'd spent the last ten Christmases in a lonely cabin in the mountains by himself. Her glance searched for his hazy form, but he was nowhere to be seen. Not, she'd discovered, that that meant he wasn't still around.
"David, I need this time to myself. I've looked forward to it, I deserve it, and I'm going to have it."
"You know, I've come all this way." He tried to pull her to him again, but she turned her back on him. "Why don't I just crash here for the night and then - "
She spun around and sent him a glare that he should have been able to read by now.
"You can stay for lunch and then you're leaving. You know, this hasn't helped your case any. You keep telling me you're sensitive to my artistic needs, but when I need to get away, you give me barely twenty-four hours before you're following on my heels. You're smothering me, David, and I don't need to be smothered!"
He glared at her then with the look that always told her she was being selfish.
“I’m not trying to smother you. I’m trying to protect you.” His gaze swept the snowy landscape, the solitary cabin, the lonely, slush-covered road. “This is an isolated place here, Alane. Accidents happen. Things...happen.” He slid back into the driver’s seat and fired up the engine. “Don’t bother with lunch. I’ll leave you here with your solitude.”
Before she could even open her mouth, he slammed the door and threw the car into reverse. Snow and slush sprayed from beneath all four tires as he spun out of the drive and fishtailed down the road.
A scant twenty-four hours earlier, his last words might have spooked her into be
gging him to stay. But today, if he’d meant to frighten her, he’d fallen far short of his goal.
*******
Jared sat at his wife's grave on the very top of the mountain overlooking the Shenandoah Valley. The tombstone marking the site had long ago crumbled away under the boots of soldiers during the Civil War, but Jared could still remember the first time he'd seen the marker, just months after their deaths.
Carved in the cold stone had been the words:
Katherine Evans Elliott
and her unborn child
Born 1781 Died 1801
Beloved Daughter
Not, "Beloved Wife and Daughter."
Jared's existence had been ignored, as had his burial, for the grave was a solitary grave, and he'd never found what had become of his earthly body.
He stared at the flat, frozen ground that held no hint of the grave lying beneath it.
He'd been fond of Katherine. He'd grown to love her, after a fashion, and he'd treated her with as much or more respect than most husbands treated their wives in that day. But he'd married her because his parents wished to join the two families, and he'd gone into the marriage knowing he would always want something more than she could give.
And God knows, she'd given him everything she'd had to give. Loved him to distraction, bowed to his every wish, very nearly groveled for any crumb of affection he'd cared to bestow upon her. And still he'd held part of himself back.
Now he loved someone with the kind of love Katherine had so craved, and he could not even touch her. For the first time in two centuries, he knew the full impact of his mother-in-law's curse.
May your soul know no peace, Jared Elliott, until you give up your existence in the name of love.
As the words and meaning finally rang clear in his mind, he did something he hadn't done in two hundred years.
He prayed.
*******
